Obamacare or ironicare?

Some people say the glitches at the Obamacare website are embarrassing. Dave Ross says that's not the really embarrassing part. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

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On Monday, President Barack Obama admitted the Healthcare.gov website is slow and glitchy.

“I want the checkout lines to be smooth, I want people to be able to get this great product,” said the president.

And over at the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot, who runs the editorial page, found the whole website thing pathetic.

“It’s terribly embarrassing in 2013 to think the nation that gave us Google, Amazon and other modern companies can’t produce a website with hundreds of millions of dollars, with three years to do it,” said Gigot.

And he’s right, it is embarrassing, it is pathetic. Someone gave the go-ahead when they should’ve said hold off.

But I would’ve thought that the anti-Obamacare folks would be happy the thing is so glitchy, because it’s saving people from this horrible insurance.

You want to talk about embarrassing. I found it embarrassing that we’re the last developed nation to finally guarantee health insurance to its citizens. And the fact that so many people keep throwing themselves at this glitchy website is an indication of just how many people had been left out.

If every American had great insurance through their jobs, there would have been zero traffic.

And the anti-Obamacare types represented by the journal editorial had at least 80 years to come up with something, but they didn’t.

On my Rossfire podcast Monday, I talked with Dan Holler of Heritage Action, which was a cheerleader for tea party Republicans, and a big opponent of Obamacare.

And I asked what would you do instead? And he was telling me you can’t force people to buy insurance, they have to learn personal responsibility, and if they get sick, they’ll just have to pony up, and pay all their back premiums. And I said, well, how many people are rich enough to do that?

“It is a problem right? There needs to be sort of this culture in this country of personal responsibility. And the more the government is involved, the less there is this sense that people are personally responsible,” said Holler.

Actually, it’s simple. Any insurance system that covers everybody has to find a way to get everybody to pay in. Period. Anything less means you have to cut somebody off and when it comes to health care, no policymaker can quite bring themselves to do that – publicly anyway.